Are Car Alarms a Thing of the Past

Removing security measures from new cars may be a dangerous tactic for the long run. Vehicle theft levels are declining at a far slower rate since early 2009, and in several regions, it has begun to rise once more. There was once a time when the sound of a car alarm would be certain to draw attention, whether it was from the owner of the vehicle or a simple passer-by. In 1992, governments restricted the sale of alarms that would go off for longer than three minutes to this day, there are still active campaigns to ban them entirely. Permitting an automobile alarm to sound would then become a violation of the law, with an increasing fine with every offence. Even the average home owner tends to find their alarm to be more of a nuisance than a benefit, if the alarm of their car goes off, the first thought that tends to come off the top of their heads isn’t that someone’s trying to snatch their car.

For a lot of people the sound of a siren is usually thought of as a nuisance or simply just another part of the background noise of the modern world, yet despite this automobile alarms are still thought of as a valuable theft deterrent.
An example of this would be the number of varied cases all across Europe where thieves have avoided vehicles with automobile alarms and, instead, have decided to attack vehicles surrounding the ‘protected’ car. Despite public opinion concerning automobile alarms and the common consensus of them being a nuisance, the fact of the matter is that thieves still take them into account as a deterrent.

One of the most popular new tricks is the installation of an ‘Immobiliser’, a small device which can be connected to the car’s engine, which allows it to be cut off with the push of a button, preventing it from starting. This can be set to work automatically as soon as the alarm goes off, or it can be done manually if you suspect someone’s trying to nick your car and prefer not to have the hassle of accidently setting it off yourself. The only catch to this is that these systems require remote replacements, which is provided as a part of the entire system.

Another rapidly increasing trend is the connection of a GPS tracker to a car. The most basic of these systems can send you the details of its location via text at request, or if you have a smartphone it can even display it on Google Maps. The more advanced version, however, can go one step further. If you have installed one of Mongoose’s Immobiliser systems on your vehicle, it just takes one command to the GPS Tracker and the engine won’t start again until you tell it to.